The racing community remembered Kramer Williamson as an 'icon' who never stopped loving racing.

Kramer Earl Williamson, 63, of Palmyra, died at York Hospital on Sunday, August 4, as a result of injuries sustained in a sprint car racing accident on Saturday at Lincoln Speedway in Abbottstown.
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York, PA -

Lynn Paxton remembers, back in the late 1960s, hearing about "some kid" running at Silver Spring Speedway in Mechanicsburg.

Paxton remembers hearing that this kid, Kramer Williamson, was not only winning but still in high school at Cumberland Valley. Williamson would go on to win the Silver Spring track title in 1969, his senior year in high school.

"That was no beginner's luck," Paxton said.

"He was never a scary rookie," Paxton said. "He was a smooth guy from the word go."

Williamson, 63, died Sunday from injuries sustained in a crash Saturday night at Lincoln Speedway in Abbottstown.

Williamson's honors included induction into the York County Racing Hall of Fame in 1994, the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Lebanon County Sports Hall of Fame in 2011. A builder as well as driver of sprint cars, he amassed more than 150 victories.

Williamson drove for J. Bob Benchoff for more than a year. Joe Benchoff, 66, the son of the former car owner, remembers a driver who stood out for the way he handled himself off the track.

"Kramer was a family man race-car driver, a close-knit family man," Benchoff said. "He seemed to always have his wife in tow.

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"He was a very personable driver -- a lot of drivers seem to be uppity or snobbish, but not him."

Paxton and Williamson -- two members of the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame -- competed against each other for more than a decade.

"Four nights a week we were at each other," Paxton said.

Yet they remained friends. Williamson even raced in Paxton's car a couple times.

"He was a good heady driver, very smart," Paxton said. "He had a good head on his shoulders and didn't take a lot of chances. ... He was a gentleman in a race car; he wasn't shovey."

Even after retiring as a race car driver, Paxton remained friends with Williamson, even though they didn't see each other as often. Whenever they ran into each other, perhaps at a flea market, they fell into the same routine.

"He and I badgered each other forever," Paxton said. "I saw him a lot more when we were racing together ... but we were good enough friends that I could say 'right' and he'd say 'left' and then we would argue about it. That was normal."

Paxton recorded 224 sprint car victories, but he retired from racing when he was just 39. When asked by another sprint car driver recently how he knew it was time to retire, Paxton explained that when he showed up at the track and wanted to be somewhere else it was time to stop.

Williamson never stopped racing.

"It would be tough for me to race and know I wasn't going to have an opportunity to win (on a nightly basis)," Paxton said. "But he loved racing so much, he just loved it apparently. He raced continuously for 40 years.

"He died doing exactly what he loved to do, but I feel really bad for the family. ... It's going to be tough. When you lose the patriarch, that's a tough loss."

Even though all race-car drivers understand the implicit dangers of the sport, it's not something many of them talk about or battle with on a regular basis.

"It's always something that will happen to someone else, not you," Paxton said. "That has to be the mentality. If you climb into a race car scared, you better not get into one.

"These race cars are built to take a certain type of pounding. ... You see some horrendous flips and crashes, but it's like falling from a 100-story building. It's not the fall that kills you. The sudden stop kills you -- not the fall. When you see a car that gets up and rolls, it's losing energy. But when you see one get up and get onto something direct and stop -- the body can't take that, it just can't."

Current sprint car driver Lance Dewease broke his neck racing two years ago. While he needed to make some changes when he returned, his biggest fear in driving doesn't involve his race car.

"This is a dangerous sport, but it's not like you can't be driving down the street and get hit by a drunk driver," Dewease said. "I feel safer in my race car than I do driving my street car."

It's been a devastating year for the sprint car community. Driver Jason Leffler died from injuries sustained in a crash in June in New Jersey, while driver Josh Burton died from injuries sustained in a crash about two weeks prior in Bloomington, Ind.

"This is more of a rarity than you would think," sprint car driver Greg Hodnett said. "I don't know why it's happening now in this particular year. ... But I don't think it's because of one particular reason.

"If it was because of one thing that kept happening over and over, we could change it. In each of these incidents I don't know if you could say anything was a common denominator." @jimseip; 771-2025. Ed Gotwals of the (Chambersburg) Public Opinion contributed to this story.